Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  What overflowed in Bethine Church was pride. She had been sitting in the Family Gallery all evening, and when the vote began, she did not know how it was going to go. “You couldn’t take notes in the gallery, so I was tallying the vote on my hands and feet,” she was to recall. The vote went, of course, the way her husband wanted it to go, “and when I left the gallery I was so excited.” She hoped there was awareness of Frank’s importance in the civil rights fight, and as she was leaving the Capitol that night, she found out there was. “I got to the bottom floor, and I started through the swinging doors, and Jack Kennedy caught my arm as I was going through the door and he said, ‘Your man pulled it off! He did a great job!’”

  Kennedy wasn’t alone in that assessment. “After my role in the passage of that civil rights legislation, Lyndon Johnson was warmly and massively grateful, so much so that I was almost stifled in his embrace,” Frank Church said. “He would pick you up and wrap his arms around you and just squeeze the air out.” The gratitude of the Leader took tangible forms. At a cocktail party early in the year, Bethine, talking with a group of people, had remarked that she had always wanted to visit South America. Johnson had heard her, and two weeks after the jury trial vote, she was in South America. After the vote, Johnson named her husband the Senate’s representative to a ten-day conference, in Buenos Aires, of the Organization of American States. The assignment was “a kind of indication of his new friendship and embrace,” Church realized.

  There were other indications. “Nothing was too good for me,” Church was to say. “First [in March, 1958] he put me on the McClellan [Labor] Rackets Committee,” which was about to begin its publicity-rich hearings into the Teamsters Union and Jimmy Hoffa, and told Church why he was doing so: “I’ve got a vacancy there to fill, and it will give you some good exposure…. I think it will be good for you.” And then there was the committee appointment for which Church had longed. “After a decent interval [after the jury trial addendum], Johnson put him on Foreign Relations, in what was a tacit quid pro quo, which was never expressed, but which I think was understood,” Ward Hower says.

  Actually, the interval was barely decent. The very next vacancy on Foreign Relations occurred in January, 1959, and Church was appointed to it. In making the appointment Johnson simply bypassed not only Estes Kefauver but Scoop Jackson and a half dozen other senators with greater seniority than Church who had requested the post. Church had wanted “not only to go on” the committee, but “to go on early,” so that he could be chairman, like Borah, someday. Now he had gone on early; calling on its staff director, Carl Marcy, not long after his appointment, he looked at the portraits of the committee chairmen hanging on the wall, and said, “Maybe someday I’ll be there.”

  And there was a note—undated, but it was probably written in 1958—scribbled by Lyndon Johnson one day when he was sitting in on a meeting of the Interior Committee of which Church was a member, a note that indicates how accurately Johnson had read the easy-to-follow text that was Frank Church. “Frank,” the note said, “I told Drew Pearson yesterday I wanted him to help me give you a build up over the years that would give you the recognition your ability deserve[s]. Someday you can, may & should be our President.”

  *See Volume I, The Path to Power, pp. 450–53.

  41

  Omens

  THE PASSAGE OF THE JURY TRIAL AMENDMENT, coming on top of the elimination of Part III, infuriated Republicans—those who had been fighting for Brownell’s unamended bill out of a sincere belief in civil rights because they felt that those two changes rendered the original bill meaningless, those who had been fighting for political advantage for the GOP because they felt the advantage had been lost. They sought to regain it. Fuming from his long and fruitless day trying to win back GOP senators, Vice President Nixon, flanked by Deputy Attorney General Rogers, was heading out for dinner on the evening of the jury trial vote when he encountered Joe Rauh and Paul Sifton in a Senate corridor. They had a brief conversation—the conversation in which all four agreed that they were about to lose that vote—and then Nixon said, “Boys, I think we ought to consider whether the best strategy wouldn’t be to just let the civil rights bill die in conference this year, and then make an all-out fight for a stronger bill next year.” President Eisenhower, informed of the result when he awoke the next morning, could not have been angrier if he had missed an easy putt. He opened that day’s Cabinet meeting by calling the Senate action “one of the most serious political defeats of the past four years, primarily because of a denial of a basic principle of the United States,” the right to vote, and his formal statement at that day’s press conference, read with a grim expression on his face, was one of the angriest he had ever made publicly about Congress. “Rarely in our entire legislative history have so many extraneous issues been introduced into the debate,” he said, adding how “bitterly disappointing” the vote had been to “millions of Americans who … will continue … to be disenfranchised.” “The blackest of black days,” Ann Whitman wrote in her diary.

  The gutting of the bill—even with Church’s addendum to the jury trial amendment—infuriated some African-American leaders. Among those who urged Eisenhower not to sign it were some from a new generation, like Jackie Robinson, who telegraphed, “HAVE WAITED THIS LONG FOR BILL WITH MEANING—CAN WAIT A LITTLE LONGER,” and some from the old, like A. Philip Randolph, who said, “It is worse than no bill at all.” And some black Americans blamed Lyndon Johnson for the gutting. Ethel Payne, who was covering the Senate for the Chicago Defender, was to recall how “We all sat watching while Lyndon Johnson, the most astute maneuverer on the Hill, cracked his whip and marshalled his forces to cut the guts and the heart out of the bill.” And the changes infuriated liberals, who saw the addendum as a cynical device to give the appearance of meaningfulness to something that had no meaning since southern juries would almost certainly include at least one white. “Can one then picture a jury from the Deep South unanimously finding a white election official guilty for depriving a Negro of the right to vote?” Paul Douglas asked. “A hung jury is almost as good as an acquittal.” Church’s idealistic young staff members Ward and Phyllis Hower felt their senator had been wrong to introduce it; so “emotional” was Phyllis about it that for weeks she could barely bring herself to talk to her boss.

  What good was the bill as a whole? liberals asked. The jury trial amendment rendered toothless the provisions about voting—and voting was now the only right covered by the bill. “The Federal government is still prevented from coming to the aid of hard-pressed citizens whose civil rights to unsegregated schooling, transportation, and other public facilities are denied,” Paul Douglas said. “These people, who are almost universally poor and weak [must still] fight their costly and protracted legal battles alone…. It has been the advocates of segregation and white domination who have won the major triumph.” An old man who for years had stood shoulder to shoulder with Douglas, and who had left the Senate battlefield because he was afraid he could no longer be effective on it, had been anxiously following the debate in a Congressional Record that he had arranged to have flown every day to his hotel in Switzerland, and he wrote to console his longtime ally. “I know how deeply you have felt on this subject, and of your inevitable sense of disappointment and frustration,” Herbert Lehman wrote. “I want you to know, however, how much I have admired your leadership…. What you have done has been one of the few bright spots in an otherwise very gloomy and frightening situation.” But Lehman had to confess that he himself was “sorely disappointed…. The bill in its present form will be merely a gesture and quite ineffective.” The anger of such liberals focused on Lyndon Johnson—“I was so mad at Johnson I was speechless, for gutting the bill so much,” recalls Joe Rauh—and was given voice by liberal columnists. On August 5, for example, Thomas Stokes denounced “the sham perpetrated upon the Senate and the American people” which “intrudes upon the human dignity of millions of persons who for a long time have suffered denial of g
uaranteed rights which the rest of us take for granted.”

  “The civil rights fiasco in the Senate … was admittedly a triumph for the southern wing,” Stokes wrote. “It was, too, a compliment, if of dubious character, for the ingenious and slick leadership of Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas. In this case, he virtually compromised the civil rights bill out of existence in the zeal of exercising his talents of maneuver and behind-the-scenes negotiations of which he is so proud…. Looking back on it all, we might say that never was strategy so brilliant to bring about so evil a result.” The New York Post, which had been denouncing Richard Nixon for years, said that in this fight Lyndon Johnson had made even Nixon look good.

  FRUSTRATION AND ANGER LED some Republican senators at first to favor the course that Nixon had suggested in the Senate corridor. Somehow the civil rights issue, which was their issue, had been captured by the Democrats. “The Republicans are understandably quite furious that Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, the Senate Democratic Leader, is now getting the credit of sorts for having navigated a civil rights bill through the Senate without… a filibuster,” Rowland Evans wrote. And if the Democrats got credit, the Republicans might well get blame. The bill had been stripped of its enforcement provisions—and the burden of enforcement would fall on a Republican Justice Department. When enforcement efforts failed, as, thanks to the jury trial amendment, they would inevitably fail, “the Republicans, not the Democrats, will have to make the explanations to disillusioned Negro voters,” Evans wrote. The solution for the GOP might lie in the next stage of the bill’s legislative journey: the House had passed a bill—Brownell’s original bill, a bill that included Part III and did not include any provision for jury trials—very different from the bill the Senate had passed. The two bills had to be reconciled, and unless some unusual step was taken, they would go for reconciliation to a joint House-Senate conference committee. Southern representatives and senators were generally heavily represented on these committees, which also included key members of the committees into whose jurisdiction the bill fell—so not only Judiciary’s Olin Johnston but Judiciary’s Chairman Jim Eastland might well be members of the Senate delegation. If a compromise could not be agreed on, the bill would die in conference. That prospect was not at all displeasing to some Republicans: Since the bill could only hurt their party, why not just let it die? Since the conference committee would be dominated by Democrats, Democrats would be blamed for the death, and civil rights would then be a potent issue for the GOP in the 1958 election year. “It would be infinitely better to let the bill die and wait three months [until January, 1958, when the next session of Congress would begin] and get a real bill,” House GOP Leader Joseph Martin said.

  In the first flush of resentment over the jury trial amendment, those senators who were derided as “the all-out civil rights forces” felt the same way. Nixon’s suggestion had struck a responsive chord in the deeply disappointed Rauh, and after the yeas and nays had confirmed their gloomy prediction and Rauh was leaving the gallery, he told Paul Sifton angrily, “This bill is worth less than nothing.” Leaving Sifton, he walked out of the Capitol, into the night, and felt himself seized with anger. “Well, let’s kill the bill, maybe Nixon’s right,” he muttered to himself. Other members of the Douglas Group felt the same way. Wayne Morse said he hoped the Senate would reject “this bad bill” when the vote on the entire bill was taken on August 7. And of course the South agreed. What, from Richard Russell’s standpoint, had been the most desirable result all along but the death of the bill? What difference did it make, ultimately, where it was killed? If it hadn’t been done on the Senate floor, then the Conference Committee would do just fine.

  While that was liberals’ first reaction, however, it didn’t last. Liberals and black leaders—the veteran, battered crusaders for civil rights—had been fighting for so long in vain that, on more sober consideration, they realized how hard it had been to pass any civil rights bill, and how essential it was that that accomplishment, no matter how meagre it was, be recognized. The morning after the 51–42 vote, Joe Rauh was just getting out of bed when his telephone rang, and it was Clarence Mitchell saying, as Mitchell’s biographer recounts, “that the civil rights forces had to support what was left of the bill before people got the idea that the legislative process could not work in the field of civil rights.” This bill, no matter how weak it was, was proof that the process could work, Mitchell said. Congress hadn’t passed a civil rights law in eighty-two years, but it was on the very verge of passing one now. Mitchell recognized, his biographer says, “the psychological and historical importance” if it was actually passed.

  Dealing with these leaders was made easier also by their hope that if the accomplishment was finalized—if the House and Senate versions were reconciled into one bill, and the bill was signed into law—future accomplishments would become easier; Johnson’s argument was being accepted, right down to its wording. Recalls Richard Boiling: “All of a sudden you started hearing it all over the place: ‘We’ve got to break the virginity.’ You heard guys saying that thing about ‘Once they do it the first time, it won’t be so hard to get them to do it the next time.’” And it was made easier by their understanding—since they for so long had gotten, for all their efforts, nothing—that this bill, no matter how weak it was, was not nothing. It may not have been much, but it was something.

  In addition, Johnson had on his side, in Philip Graham, a very potent weapon. Johnson needed that weapon. It was difficult for him to talk directly to some of these leaders—including the one who was probably the single most influential, ADA National Chairman Rauh—so great was their distrust of him. So the weapon had to be deployed, no matter what the cost.

  “By the summer of 1957, Phil was clearly exhausted and in need of rest,” Katharine Graham would say. She did not know then how ill her husband was, but it was, she would write, “obvious … that he was high-strung and had overextended himself.” They had decided, in her words, to “retreat to Glen Welby,” and had spent the summer “playing with the children and just doing nothing,” except for occasional interludes like the luncheon for Rauh and Frankfurter. And then, right after the passage of the jury trial amendment, Lyndon Johnson telephoned Phil at the farm and asked him “to come back to Washington to help him win passage” of the civil rights bill. Mrs. Graham tried to persuade him not to go. “I knew that he was very frail,” she would say. “I knew that he shouldn’t go up and do that.” She was, however, unsuccessful. “So Phil returned to Washington, somewhat to my concern, and stayed with Lyndon almost constantly for several days, working day and night,” telephoning Rauh and other civil rights leaders to urge them to support the bill even in its weakened form, making one call after another, far into the evening. On several nights, he slept on a couch in Johnson’s office. Graham would, of course, have been a wonderful advocate even had he not brought with him the power of the Post, so deeply did he believe in what he was fighting for. “From the point of view of many political observers, what LBJ did was to take everything out of the bill except the right to vote,” Mrs. Graham was to write. “Phil’s argument was that the only thing that really counted about the bill was the right to vote.” He spent a great deal of time on the telephone with Rauh, George Reedy recalls. “You could see he was very tired, nervous, but more than anyone else, I think you have to say it was he who persuaded Rauh.”

  Graham persuaded Rauh, and Rauh helped persuade Roy Wilkins, who in 1957 was another civil rights leader whose feelings about Lyndon Johnson were, at best, ambivalent. “In those days, Johnson was just beginning to get religion on civil rights,” Wilkins was to write in his autobiography. “He dreamed of becoming President himself, and knew that so long as he had Jim Crow wrapped around him, the rest of the country would see him only as a Southerner, a corn-pone Southerner at that, rather than a man of national stature. So around 1957 he began to change his course on civil rights.”

  “With Johnson, you never quite knew if he was out to lift you
r heart or your wallet,” Wilkins was to write. He and other black leaders had had “a number of meetings with Johnson during the spring and early summer” of 1957, at which “he told us frankly that all he cared about was voting rights, that the bill couldn’t pass with Title III.” Wilkins could understand that—“That was too much for Dixie,” he was to say. But it was much harder to swallow the jury trial amendment. That, he was to say, “was simply a device to defend segregation, not to defend the sanctity of the jury system.” But Rauh and other liberals worked on Wilkins—“Roy,” Hubert Humphrey said to him one day, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned in politics, it’s never to turn your back on a crumb”—and Wilkins finally agreed to call a meeting of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights: the leaders of sixteen organizations—the NAACP, the ADA, three Jewish organizations including the American Jewish Congress, the American Council on Human Rights, the international Elks organization, a Quaker organization, the National Community Relations Advisory Board, and seven major labor unions—to “thrash the problem out.”

  The Senate vote on the overall civil rights bill was scheduled for Wednesday evening, August 7, and the meeting, held in the library of Rauh’s law firm on K Street, began on Wednesday morning. At the beginning of the day, the prevailing sentiment was to decline to support the bill, but the prevailing sentiment hadn’t had Phil Graham talking to it. “Joe [Rauh] argued that … once Congress had lost its virginity on civil rights, it would go on to make up for what had been lost,” Wilkins wrote.